New Year, New Repentance

“Do you have any new year’s resolutions?” I asked students one time during a campus ministry Christmas gathering. “Yes, I want to be more spiritually grounded and sin less this new year”, one of the students said. But, what is sin exactly? It is always interesting to hear the answers that young people give me when I have asked that question. From my experience working as a campus minister and youth mentor in different community programs in Toronto, I have noticed that the concept of sin is often understood as anything that tempts you to engage in something that others— especially parents or religious authorities— consider to be wrong. In this context, avoiding spending time with the ‘wrong crowd’, staying away from alcohol, drugs, premarital sex, and even obscene music and films, was considered for them to be safe from sinning.

Traditionally, in many Christians communities, when a person becomes a Christian, it is implied that this person would turn from her sinful acts and attempt to avoid engaging in them again. In this scenario, the process of sanctification is understood as a moment in life where these sinful acts happen less and less, and it is crucial to find an environment where the individual is less liable to be tempted and sin again. Hence, it is totally understandable why many Christian youth initiatives and campus ministry gatherings are seen as safe spaces that keep young people away from the sin that appears to abound in the streets. 

This approach underestimates its depth, power, and pervasiveness by making youth think that a few right choices in life can put them well on the path of being almost holy.

But there is a problem with this idea that is often overlooked in Christian spaces. The issue with defining sin simply as a problem that exists “out there” in the streets is that sin becomes something we can control just by being careful enough. By creating a subculture in which youth do not need to engage in the problems of their community but rather withdraw from them to avoid being tempted by the difficult social conditions of the streets, Christians parents and religious youth leaders begin to oversimplify the way sin works in people and in their community. In this way, apart from portraying sin as something too easily identifiable and avoidable, this approach underestimates its depth, power, and pervasiveness by making youth think that a few right choices in life can put them well on the path of being almost holy.

Many of the young people I have interacted with in the past have come to these Christian spaces from contexts of violence, poverty, racial profiling, and inequality in their families and their neighbourhoods. For them, simply withdrawing from a tough environment is not an easy solution to their problems. So, how should we understand the concept of sin apart from simply staying away from evil and temptation? As I experienced it in some Christian youth programs in low income neighbourhoods of Toronto, the emphasis on teaching merely the individual and personal aspect of sin may have helped young people explore their behaviours and repent from their bad deeds, but it has left their interaction and analysis with the social structures around them untouched.

The biblical text is clear in the fact that the consequences of sin and evil are never just personal

By focusing simply on creating a subculture where young people can withdraw from the temptations of the streets and pursue a life of ‘personal holiness’, some of our Christian spaces have overlooked the fact that, where people live together, they are always inserted into a world of institutions and mediations that include the economy, culture, family, and politics, among others. The biblical text is clear in the fact that the consequences of sin and evil are never just personal, and offering young people the opportunity to reflect on the idea that sin is not simply an obstacle to get to heaven will allow them to see that sin is also, and perhaps more importantly, an obstacle to their present life reaching the fullness that Christians call shalom in their neighbourhoods. 

So, is sin a topic that we should stop emphasizing so much among young people? Not necessarily. My hope is to continue creating spaces where youth can see that sin must not be treated exclusively as an ethical concept that guides the good and bad behaviours of human beings. As Christian leaders we have a unique opportunity to empower young people living under challenging social circumstances through a Christian message that treats the social ills of their community not simply as a moral issue, but also as an undeniable theological problem where the fruit of repentance will be the desire to transform the difficult conditions of their community into spaces of justice, reconciliation, and peace. This, I think, would be a good new year’s resolution.

Photo by Matt Hoffman on Unsplash